PIA05428: Beyond the Rings: Mimas

Looking beyond Saturn’s magnificent rings, Cassini caught a glimpse of the
moon Mimas in orbit about the gas giant. Parts of Saturn’s F and A rings
are visible in the upper right corner. Here the thin F ring exhibits some
of the complex structure for which it is well-known. Cassini was, at the
time, speeding away from the Saturn system on its initial long, looping
orbit. Mimas, pronounced “MY-muss,” has a diameter of 398 kilometers (247
miles).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on July 13, 2004, from a distance of about 5.1 million
kilometers (3.2 million miles) from Mimas. The Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or
phase angle of the image is 94 degrees. The image scale is 31 kilometers
(19 miles) per pixel. Brightness has been enhanced slightly to aid
visibility.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science,
Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras, were
designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.